Nathaniel & co.: All is well? Really?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, October 1, 2017

6:15 a.m. We as 3D beings may be receiving different-colored input (so to speak), as well as coloring it ourselves?

You are part of a process, not only the result of a process. Creation isn’t finished, and creation isn’t something that was done to you, so to speak. It is something done with you, and is forever being done with you, not merely to you. Remember this, if you can.

As I was writing that, I got an image of people watching television, passively receiving input.

That may be how it seems to them, and it may be how it seems to you, but in reality even “passive” is active, in a sense. You might as well describe plants in a garden as being passive to input like water. Receiving is transforming, conscious or not.

I think I’ve gotten that, but you’re going to want to expand upon it, I think.

Of course. The point is that it isn’t really possible for you (that is, for anyone) to remain unaffected by anything that flows through you. Even an active decision not to be changed would be a change, you see.

The resolution would itself be a change from a prior state.

Even if it were a continuing resolution, yes, it represents an effect of an interaction.

Moral of story, be careful what you allow in as input?

Well, that could be a long subject if we followed it out. After all, what you choose to allow in can’t exactly be said to be random. But yes, you need to choose as much by what you won’t consider as by what you consider and decide upon. The point at the moment, though, is that you are never inert recipients; you are by nature, and inevitably, creators. That one particular aspect that you attribute to your God or gods is the one single descriptor that best includes all humans. Creators. But creation is not merely a matter of imagination, of focused thought, any more than it is of skilled hands, or channeled willpower. It is your essence, your continued and uninterrupted and uninterruptable effect upon the world around you and within you. Every moment, you create by what you are. You are creating your flower, remember; you are creating a habit-system (your mind); you are molding the possibilities of the present moment in the context of past moments and future moments. And of course it all proceeds in a broader context – past lives, other versions, interactions with all the parts of your Sam, and so on  and so forth.

I don’t know, that sounds kind of high-flying. Too mystical to still have any practical meaning, almost.

Oh do you think so? Then you tell me (so to speak) the meaning of uncounted lives that last maybe 10 or 15 years in the middle of some African war-zone, or in semi-starvation somewhere in Asia, or in meaningless drudgery in middle America. We are not here referring to poverty or suffering or even a sense of ennui or depressed frustration, though there are plenty of exemplars of those. But, in general, how do you make sense of the world if you think (implicitly, as you often do) that the measure of a life is what one does with it?

All is well, then? Is that why you can say all is well? Because no matter how miserable a life people may have, it is a creation somehow?

You see, we just pushed a button you didn’t quite realize was still wired up.

You certainly did, I take it deliberately.

Well, we aren’t sorry to have done so. the more you are aware of, the larger your options, as you know.

I put it, if it’s unconscious it controls you, and if you make it conscious, you control it.

It comes to the same thing. It is always well to have compassion for others and to do what you can for those who touch your life. But it is a hasty person who concludes that life is poorly designed because the world is full of suffering and – an even more common, if unconscious reason – because the world does not conform to our expectations of it, or our desires for it. Here’s an experiment: Why don’t you do something to prevent the slave trade of the 17th century? Or, why not prevent the Roman Republic from degenerating into the Roman Empire? Or stop the Opium War of 1842? Those are all worthy causes, and your ability to affect them is exactly the same as your ability to affect things halfway around the world today.

Between the lines, I get, “unless your life calls you that way.”

Well, unless your life brings you there, or brings them to you, yes. Explain.

They aren’t saying don’t help when you can; they’re saying don’t confuse feeling bad over a situation with actually doing something to help, and don’t spend your life feeling guilty that you are leading your life instead of somebody else’s. I get that the people who formed the anti-slavery society, for instance, were doing something that came to them, or they were finding a way to affect something that was affecting them. This isn’t a contradiction to what they’re saying, but an illustration of it.

That’s right. If you are called to a crusade, all right. But if you are called to every crusade, well – not only do practical objections arise, but what you are doing with your self-creation is not perhaps what you think you are doing. Look, all paths are good; we aren’t saying, “don’t do that, it’s futile,” any more than we would say, “don’t do that, you’ll make God mad at you.” We are saying what you decide will be what you do, and what you do (internally as well as externally) will be what you are. And it is “what you are” that ultimately will count.

But there is a larger point to be made, and a more difficult one, that is closer to our central concern. Life is good, no matter what it looks like to you. Human life on earth in 2017 is not mostly a failure, no matter how it looks to you. Your political and social and economic and ecological troubles – not to mention the huge spiritual vortex stirring up everything, ramping up the intensity of all conflicts, and not merely in the United States – all of this could tempt you to say, all is obviously not well. We are doomed. The injustice of the world is suffocating us all.

Here’s the thing: Can you hold that thought and feeling – which is not wrong – and still realize that all is well because all is always well?

I think people would be glad if you could help them with it.

We can, probably making them angry in the process because it involves associating two lines of thought that they typically are careful to keep separate, even if they shuttle from one to the other several times a minute.

Exaggeration for effect, I take it.

Not much of one. On the one hand, follow the news, with its unending serial of disaster upon problem upon intractable conflict. You mostly do it all the time, scarcely even noticing. Studying it in history isn’t all that much different from allowing it to flow through you via television or computer or gossip. Even sagas of heroism, altruism, even success stories, take place against a background of on-going train wrecks. Or, if you prefer to believe in the existing state of affairs as desirable, you see it as a past record of achievement now being threatened by the forces of (the left, or the right, depending upon your villain of choice). Either way, this half of your mind is pretty firmly mounted in a setting of on-going unfairness, stupidity, incompetence, malice and – in general – a throwing-away of all good possibilities, and unnecessarily.

True enough. That has been my experience since Nov. 22, 1963.

Certainly. You compare what did happen with what you think might have happened, or should have, could have happened, and it all looks like waste.

It does.

So you understand that half of the dilemma, the half that looks around and says all is certainly not well, and anybody who thinks so is blind or stone-hearted. And by nature and on faith you nonetheless hold to the conviction that somehow all is well, regardless.

I hold to it, I feel it, but I certainly can’t explain it or even defend it.

And, unlike many, you are able to hold both incompatibles at the same time. Do you know why?

I do since you just conveyed it. (At least I imagine that’s what just happened.) It’s because I got “all is well” not from somebody else, either first-hand or second-hand, but from essence. The guys flowed it through me, telling Rita in 2001, and I never doubted it, even if, as you point out, it is incompatible with everything else I know.

That is where we can go next, then. How can both be true, and what does that tell us about those vast impersonal energies flowing through you, which we remind you is our main focus at the moment.

Okay, thanks. And I think it does help for you to announce the next episode of our on-going serial at the end of each one. It helped this morning, anyway.

That was the idea.

Okay. Till next time.

 

FDR, and Lindbergh

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

FDR

Like John F. Kennedy later, Franklin Roosevelt was more than an American politician and statesman. Something in his demeanor and what he was thought to stand for caught people’s imagination. They invested hope in him. When he died, the crowds in England stood stunned, or wept, and felt as bereaved as if they had lost a member of their own family – and this was before television brought moving, talking images into the home. If they felt they knew Roosevelt, it was from the movie newsreels, and from the newspapers and radios, and from the feeling that they had that he had been the friend of the things they believed in, and had, therefore, been a friend to them. Wilson, as we shall see, was popular for a while, and the common people put their trust in him. But Roosevelt caught their imagination and their affection and their trust as no American had done since Lincoln, and none would do again until Kennedy, and perhaps Eisenhower.

For one thing, there was the spectacle of his fighting the good fight against the forces of reaction, as he set Congress to restructuring the American political landscape. Regulation of the stock market, of the banking industry, of monopolies, of so many aspects of what had been until then a comfortable club making its own rules to suit itself. And there was his personal struggle to overcome the polio that had struck him down before he was 40, turning a tall, athletic, vigorous young patrician into a wheelchair-bound cripple. He had fought his way back from paralysis, finding and developing Warm Springs, Georgia, as a hospital for the similarly afflicted. (Remember the March of Dimes? That was a Roosevelt conception, organized not only for research into the cure of polio but specifically to support Warm Springs.)

And, more than anything else, perhaps, Roosevelt was revered as the linchpin of American assistance to those fighting the Axis powers. Though he dared not intervene in Spain, he was soon intervening to the edge of the law and beyond it, to weaken Hitler and strengthen the Allies. Lend-Lease, American patrols of the Western Atlantic, the Atlantic Charter, and always his encouragement of coalitions of powers against the Nazis. No less than Churchill – and even more important, because leading the only country that could defeat Germany – he was the father figure many a European leaned on.

Another American icon appeared in the years before the war, before Roosevelt, before the Great Depression, while the twenties were still roaring. He was a shy, modest 25-year-old boy, and he electrified the world with one 33-hour-long feat of skill, luck and endurance.

 

Lindbergh

A few months after the end of World War I, a man named Orteig had offered $25,000 to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Eight years later, the Orteig prize remained unclaimed, but several people were racing to be the first. They were all well known except the boy.

In September, 1926, a three-engine biplane carrying a three-men team led by French World War I ace Rene Fonck crashed and burned on takeoff, killing the two crewmen. The following April, two famed U.S. Naval aviators, testing another three-engine biplane, died when their plane, too, crashed on takeoff. In early May, French war heroes Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli disappeared at sea on a westward flight from Paris in a seaplane.

Two weeks later, three more airplanes were preparing to fly east from Long Island. One was a two-man team led by American air racer Clarence Chamberlin, and the other was a four-man team led by Commander (later Rear Admiral) Richard Byrd. The third was not a team but a lone 25-year-old pilot who, the year before, had been flying the air mail route between St. Louis and Chicago, and his airplane was a single-engine overhead-wing monoplane whose design and construction he had overseen during the winter.

He had much less flying experience than any of the others, none of it over water. He was financing the flight on a $15,000 bank loan, a $1,000 donation from his employer at Lambert Field, St. Louis, and his own small savings. He had had to teach himself great-circle navigation, because he was afraid that if he asked the military to teach him, he would be forbidden to make the attempt. In order to keep down inessential weight, he was flying without a radio. That meant that from eight a.m. May 20, 1927, all through the day and the long night and a good part of the next day, there was no way for the world to know if he was still alive and in the air, or had joined the six who had been killed in the weeks just past.

After that long night, he was spotted over the coast of Ireland, then over England, and then, at nearly 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, he landed at Le Bourget field in Paris, and he and his frail craft were overrun by a hysterically welcoming mob estimated at 150,000 people. The effect his successful flight produced was perhaps proportional to the anxiety caused by the long night – and the dead airmen who had preceded him.

The French Foreign Office flew the American flag for him, President Coolidge sent a Navy cruiser to bring him and his airplane home. The Post Office issued an Air Mail stamp in his honor. He was given a ticker-tape parade in New York City. He was Time magazine’s first “Man of the Year.” His book We, published within months, sold 650,000 copies within a year, earning him a quarter of a million dollars. The boy his friends had always called Slim was being called Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle.

His influence on aviation was phenomenal. Applications for pilot’s licenses in the U.S. tripled. The number of licensed aircraft quadrupled. The number of airline passengers grew 3,000%, to 173,405 in 1929, from 5,782 in 1926. Aviatrix Elinor Smith Sullivan later said that Lindbergh’s flight changed aviation forever because “after Lindbergh, suddenly everyone wanted to fly, and there weren’t enough planes to carry them.”

For more – much more — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh

Oh, and those other two teams that we left on Long Island waiting to fly? Chamberlain made it from New York to Germany in a 43 hour flight two weeks later. Byrd and his team left on June 29, reached Paris on July 1, and, being unable to land there due to weather conditions, wound up ditching in the ocean off Normandy. They both succeeded in making the crossing, and they did it within weeks of Lindbergh’s solo flight. But it didn’t matter. That flight – and something in his winning personality — made Charles A. Lindbergh into an icon, not only in his own country but all through Europe and around the world. And that fame lasted. More than 25 years later, he won a Pulitzer Price with The Spirit of St. Louis, which, among other things, told of his out-of-body experience and spiritual contacts during that long night over the North Atlantic.